Update / May 2022
The Reid Technique is getting publicity because of its use in the Melissa Lucio case.
https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2022/04/texas-execution-melissa-lucio-mother/
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/voices-m-expert-false-confessions-201505436.html
She is a Texas woman whose child died after a fall down some stairs.
Despite the fall having been witnessed by another child, police decided to get a confession from her.
Eventually she agreed to confess, but made it clear many times that she had not actually killed her daughter.
Several weeks from her execution the state agreed to postpone her execution because of considerable evidence that the 'murder' never happened.
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False confessions have been an integral part of the U.S. legal system for a long time.
""I didn't know that I had done it, but I done it," he said in the confession"
"Meanwhile, "the prosecution’s own expert had concluded prior to the original trial that Thibodeaux falsely confessed based on fear of the death penalty, but this information was never shared with the defense," according to The Innocence Project."
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May 16, 2021
Two men who spent decades in prison after being coerced into giving a false confession are awarded $75 million.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/men-wrongfully-death-row-awarded-75m-damages-77715333
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Confessions are an essential part of any civilized melting pot justice system, for a reason.
A good way of understanding a culture’s stance towards crime is to study their stance towards individual development.
Buddhism is famously tolerant, for example, while Christianity is generally considered more punitive. Buddha forgives you now, Jesus will forgive you later.
Confessions ultimately reflect an aspect of development.
Milarepa is a famous legendary character in Tibetan Buddhism while Jesus is the legendary leader of Christians. Both characters are generally considered fictional by outsiders, but they reflect real developmental steps.
Milarepa was a major criminal who developed into a philosophical type, and his development is described in his legend. Jesus likewise developed into a philosophical type but the details are obscure, aside from the Christian Apocrypha writings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Testament_apocrypha
According to one apocryphal scripture, Jesus blinded and killed people in his early years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infancy_Gospel_of_Thomas
So Milarepa and traditions of his followers are more practically useful in examining the developmental process because their tradition does not discourage studying that.
The origin or root of a confession is simply the realization that a mistake was made.
If a person eats a certain food and starts vomiting, they realize usually by themself that they made a mistake, and they learn to be more discriminating about what they eat.
But suppose a small child kept eating food that caused vomiting. Some people would a) let the kid learn even though they have to clean up a bit. Others would b) force the child to learn more quickly.
Either way will lead to less vomiting, but ‘b’ causes the child to externalize responsibility. In other words ‘simple learning’ becomes something more complex requiring teachers and other things such as confessions.
The first method ‘a’ will lead to smarter and quick learning people, but it also leads to more dead children and various other natural prices.
As a general rule, more traditional societies will focus on the individual.
Their goal is to develop the individual properly with the expectation that this will lead to broader society developing properly.
A melting pot society obviously can’t do that though. There is only unproductive anarchy, accelerating violence, when several traditional groups are thrown together and forced to allow each groups youth to learn without judgment i.e., without externalizing responsibility.
Thus, in places like the United States, you will find most people educated to externalize responsibility, including requiring ‘proof’ that a person has developed to a certain point such as confessions, diplomas etc.
As the people involved in these melting pot societies get slower and slower, they begin to substitute the external proof for the original substance. A diploma becomes a substitute for learning academics, instead of symbolizing it, and a confession becomes a substitute for some moral development instead of symbolizing it.
But then, if the society continues degrading, eventually the original purpose of the externalized proof is not even connected to the original thing it was supposed to symbolize. The confession or diploma symbolizes ‘something else’, a distant derivative of whatever it was originally meant to represent or symbolize.
In this case a) Western melting pot legal systems developed to incorporate ‘a confession’ as evidence of development, thus both an acknowledgement of responsibility and a mitigation of the need for involvement by the melting pot, i.e., person confessed? They do not need to be punished. The confession is ‘proof’ of ‘rehabilitation’.
b) As the melting pot crystallizes this first step would either become less and less visible i.e., the ‘melting pot is ‘becoming an indigenous society’, or it would become more and more visible i.e., the melting pot is fracturing.
c) In this case, a ‘confession’ was gotten that has no resemblance to a confession. Esar Met was not contemplating some past action when he realized that he made a mistake. He was overpowered by a group of very simple thugs who were determined to get him to pretend that he realized the error of a specific act which he in fact was not even involved with.
In a melting pot there is always an ‘emergency need’ for techniques which shortcut normal indigenous steps.
In this case, the U.S. legal system is a sort of corporate entity.
It’s goal is to force several competing traditional societies to integrate.
Thousands of years ago this worked smoothly, and the U.S. is perfectly geared to having extraordinary lasting success if it is thousands of years ago, but it’s not.
There are competing indigenous viewpoints easily available to anybody, things which will disprove any of the ‘necessary’ fictions of the melting pot, i.e., books, the internet, etc. People are given a choice between either growing stupider by following the melting pot, or growing smarter by following the truth.
So gradually melting pots struggle to survive the cyclical return to increasing indigenous power through various charades.
In this case, regarding the development of the Reid Technique, a person with a diploma calculated that if he or she could get faster confessions then it would improve the legal system. ‘More confessions = more justice’.
How do you get a faster confession?
A signature of any melting pot is that children are encouraged to be deceptive in matters that correspond respectively to the melting pots deception of their indigenous parts, to lie and use force to get one individual to ‘join’ a group of individuals. This is overtly discouraged in adults of course, even if it is covertly necessary.
So if you want to solve the problem of ‘getting more confessions so you can improve the legal system’, the best first path is to look at how experts, melting pot children, do it.
Anybody can look at the specific steps in the Reid Technique and see that they are not some master psychological step, they are simply a copy of what poorly raised children do.
Somebody with a diploma that was worthless, solved a problem they didn’t understand, by copying from people who knew less than them.
https://people.howstuffworks.com/police-interrogation.htm#pt1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reid_technique
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"Police interviewed Tapp, collected his DNA and administered polygraph tests. Tapp initially denied to police any involvement in the crime, but during the nearly 60 hours of interrogations, including while represented by counsel, his story would change five times, leading police to view him with suspicion."
Oftentimes when police force a confession it will obviously produce inconsistent stories.
Police then tell the public that the person who they forced a confession from was being deceptive.
"In 2008, a turning point came in her investigation when she decided to study all 60 hours of Tapp’s interrogation tapes.
She found discrepancies within Tapp’s interview answers and realized he didn’t know much about what happened that night."
Notice in the Esar Met case the lengths to which the judges and lawyers went to prevent the public from examining or even viewing the confession.
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A similar example which might be more obvious to most people is marriage.
Thousands of years ago, before that word existed in its modern sense, it had an archetypal root which was a child created between two people.
So, before the modern word 'marriage' existed there was a concept or word that referred to the product of a relationship between two people i.e., a child. If you said to a caveman or cavewoman 'are you married' they would point to a child if they had one. The specific relationship with the other parent was irrelevant, but the 'marriage' was real i.e., a child.
Gradually somebody or some people examined social cave trends and extrapolated from monogamous animals in which direction humans were headed. That pirate, or those pirates, then were able to profit by 'taking over' something which was bigger than them and pretending to be its patron.
In the modern world, now this deviance has reached an extreme. A person can get power by pretending to have captured the authority that authorizes the relationship which leads to children. It's the same as pretending to cause the development behind a real confession by forcing a false confession.
It becomes an idiot's game, like feeding plastic to an animal by adding flavored chemicals to the plastic, then updating the chemicals as the animal withers and loses taste for the plastic.
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Another aspect of 'interviews' is the irony of situational memories as they relate to police interviews of rape survivors and other victims of crimes which involve memories which may be situational.
In the case of Reid Technique false confessions it is not so much the memory which is situational, but the acquiescence to authority.
Many younger people, and others, are trained to generalize parental authority to include bureaucratic authorities, a conditioned survival reaction which develops over time.
The interviewer is trained to solicit a transference from the person interviewed i.e., to encourage the subject to perceive the bureaucrat as an authority figure. Proof of this would be matching parenting styles of the subjects to success in obtaining false confessions quickly.
In cases like this, the Esar Met case, it's much more complicated, because there is a credible history of fatal consequences for not confessing in Burma.